Mogul of Mystery

Scientists puzzle over whether Donald Trump indeed exists.

Buffoon that he is, no one ever took game-show host and beauty-queen impresario Donald Trump seriously. Everyone knew what he was up to when he hitched his wagon to the birther movement, exploiting the crackpot proposition—held not just by tea partiers but also by nearly half of registered Republicans—that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen. Mr. Trump wanted publicity, and he got it (to the everlasting shame of the national media that gave him a platform).

The release of the president’s so-called “long-form” birth certificate will not silence the loonies, nor will it necessarily dissuade mainstream Republicans from pursuing their racist agenda of calling into question Mr. Obama’s legitimacy. And no doubt Mr. Trump will do his worst to stay in the limelight: He’s already claiming that the president didn’t have the smarts—after all, he’s a colored guy—to go to Columbia, let alone get into Harvard Law and become editor of the Harvard Law Review.

But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and Mr. Trump is now finding that various aspects of his own “life” are being examined, not by the nutcases, but by serious scientists of impeccable credentials. One scientist, Dr. Herbert Thornhill of Tennessee State, speaks for many of his colleagues when he says, “Donald Trump is universally acknowledged to be a vile and pernicious human specimen or, to quote Jonathan Swift, the short-fingered entrepreneur is one of the most ‘odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl on the face of the earth.’ Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon the scientific community to evaluate Mr. Trump’s cosmetic enhancements, his biology and his ontology in the most rigorous and objective manner.”

The scientific assessments of Mr. Trump fall into three broad categories: his wig, his material body and his actual being.

His Wig: There is widespread scientific agreement that the subject’s hairpiece is the worst wig in recorded human history. Several researchers raised the question of why the subject, given his vast (purported) wealth, couldn’t buy himself a decent toupee. It was hypothesized by some that the swirling mass of ziti pasta on the subject’s head is deliberately hilarious; the subject’s purpose being to distract the observer from attending too carefully to other aspects of the subject’s material body, such as his beady, rodent-like eyes and his abnormally tiny mouth (in scientific parlance, the technical term for which is pie hole). Speaking of his tiny mouth, scientists speculate that the subject has struggled to compensate for the small orifice by becoming an overbearing loudmouth.His Material Body: No one has come forward to attest to the physical reality of the subject’s corporeal substance. Ever since the subject rose to prominence with his game show, The Apprentice, he has only been seen in rather cheap-looking, custom-made suits. He invariably wears a bright-red elongated necktie, and we don’t need a smutty-minded Freudian psychologist to tell us what that’s all about. Does the subject have a penis? The overwhelming evidence is negative. Furthermore, no one has any proof whatsoever that the subject has ever voided his bladder. (There is, however, ample evidence of the subject’s other waste product, known scientifically as Number Two.)

His Being: To consider the subject’s being, the nature of his actual or metaphysical existence, scientists have enlisted the expertise of eminent philosophers in the field of ontology, which is the study of being (from Greek ont, present participle of einai, to be). Nothing is known of the subject before he emerged as the humorless host of his own game show.

A few philosophers have postulated that the figure known as “Donald Trump” is, in fact, a series of actors recruited for their tiny mouths and willingness to be laughed at in public. But the repulsiveness of “Donald Trump” is so consistent that the majority of philosophers say a multitude of Trumps would violate Aristotle’s law of singular identity.

Initially a pudgy figure of fun, the subject devolved into the operative definition of the insufferable a—hole. The question is: Does the subject, signified as “Donald Trump,” exist as a thing-in-itself (ding-an-sich) or is he merely a phantasm, such stuff as dreams are made on or in this case, nightmares, despite the fact that the subject Trump inspires not fear, but derision and contempt?

Philosophers are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entity known as “Donald Trump” is just a projection, an illusory concoction embodying the vilest tendencies of the worst segment of the American electorate.